Ed Gorman - Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

“I can’t get out there for a while.”

“Well, I’m going to lean on you a little here and play boss. I want you to get out there as soon as you can. I don’t like to hear my good friends agitated this way.” She lighted a cigarette, something she does to the tune of two packs a day. “He was so excited about his fancy new bomb shelter the last few weeks. He seems to have forgotten all about it now. Get out there as quickly as you can, McCain.”

All this is taking place during what the press had come to call the Cuban Missile Crisis. For the past four days a confrontation had been building.

And now it was a crisis. Jack Kennedy had proof that Khrushchev was on the cusp of installing Russian missiles on Cuban soil. Missiles that could easily reach America. So Kennedy had now set up a naval blockade and essentially dared Khrushchev to try and run it. The world didn’t want to think about what Khrushchev would do. The prospect of nuclear war had frozen everybody in place. You went to work, you played with your kids, you made whoopee with your wife, you paid your bills, you raked beautiful Indian-summer leaves. But no matter where you went or what you did, the subject of the missile crisis was there. If you didn’t bring it up, a friend did. In television interviews teachers explained how difficult it was to make children understand what was going on without giving them nightmares.

I’d grown up with air raid drills, with duck-and-cover, with movie and TV melodramas inspired by good old Uncle Joe McCarthy. According to him, there were more commies in the US of A than there were Americans. I’d had plenty of nightmares myself. But all that had been nothing more than practice. This could well be the nuclear war, the nuclear holocaust, the nuclear winter we had been dreading ever since 1945.

During the past four or five years, bomb shelters had become popular. Most people couldn’t afford anything fancy. They’d find a spot in their basement that could be walled off with brick or concrete block or some other fortification and then just kind of hope for the best. Most of these homemade shelters were worthless. When the nukes hit, you needed to be in some place deep and well protected.

People like Ross Murdoch, who had the wherewithal to have their shelters professionally built, just might survive for a time in their shelters. They’d been designed by architects who followed government guidelines, and they’d been built by construction men and carpenters who knew what they were doing.

The day was warm, bright, smoky with autumn haze in the piney hills. Hard to believe that all the houses, stores, schools, roads and so on could be turned into ash and rubble in an hour or two. The older you get, I’m told, the more the idea of your own extinction becomes easier to grasp, if not make your peace with. But the extinction of virtually everybody and everything you’ve grown up with? Now that was a tough one. A damned tough one. I found myself saying little fragments of prayers, something I hadn’t done in a while.

Ross Murdoch lived in a brick house that was half-hidden behind huge fir trees. I parked my red ’51 Ford ragtop in front of the front steps, got out and walked up the steps to the door.

I looked out over the land surrounding the house. Pine trees and carefully landscaped grass. A high meadow with horses, the color of chestnuts; a green John Deere in a distant field that was hauling a wagon full of new trees to be planted; and a leg of river that looked silver-blue in the sunlight. The aromas of autumn were every bit as alluring as the colors of autumn. It was one of those sweet soft days when you wished you were a bird. Or at least somebody who didn’t have to work.

I heard a voice say “Hello? May I help you?” and when I turned around I saw a young woman in a white blouse and black slacks leaning against the doorframe. She was watching me with obvious amusement. Then, “Oh. Hi. We almost met at the hospital.” Then, “You’re easily distracted, I take it?”

“Distracted?” She was the young woman who’d been talking to volunteer Peggy Leigh. She certainly got your attention.

“You knock on the door and then turn around and get so caught up in the sights that you forget all about the knock.”

“Guilty as charged.”

A gamin grin. She put forth a slender but strong hand. “I’m Deirdre Murdoch.”

“Sam McCain.”

“C’mon in, Sam. Dad’s in the den.” Then: “Oh, how do you like my car?”

I’d noticed the sleek new yellow foreign machine as I’d wheeled into the driveway. “Italian?”

“British.”

“I’m not up on my foreign cars but it’s a beaut, that’s for sure.”

The interior of the house had the feel of a museum about it. Everything fought for your attention and approval. The number of rooms seemed countless. Each room I glimpsed on the way down the parqueted main corridor looked like a furniture display in an expensive Chicago store.

“I’m not sure why he wants you here. He’s just very—” She looked troubled herself. “Did you ever see Invasion of the Body Snatchers?”

“One of my three all-time favorite movies.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely.”

“Well, Dad’s been like one of the pod people lately. And today—I’d swear he wasn’t my father at all.”

She was a beauty, I suppose, but there was a freckled, young-girl vividness about that sweet little face and that great gleaming gash of a smile that overwhelmed you when she glanced over at you.

“Mom’s very upset, too. Whatever’s bothering him, he’s keeping it to himself. At first I thought it might be the bomb shelter. You know how it is when you get things built. It’s never very smooth. And a lot of things went wrong with the shelter. It wasn’t anybody’s fault, really. It’s just that Dad’s a perfectionist. He wanted to make the shelter into a place he could go to be absolutely alone. Drink a beer or two and watch some TV. Or play some of his old Louie Armstrong records. He loves Dixieland jazz. It just got finished a couple of days ago. Mom and I were hoping that that would make him happy. But it didn’t. He’s just kept on—brooding. That’s the only word I can think of.”

“The campaign’s got to be taking its toll on him by now.”

“I know. But—but this is like a personality change. Like a pod person.” We walked up to the door of the den. She knocked once and then opened the door.

The den was a sanctuary of wall-to-wall books, several Vermeer lithographs, genuine Persian rugs, a desk a fighter jet could land on, and so much leather furniture the cattle population must have been seriously depleted when the manufacturer was putting it together. The sunlight angling through the window gave the wide, deep room a serenity that belied all those dead animal eyes staring at me.

Ross Murdoch was a slender six-footer in a white shirt, blue slacks and cinnamon-colored cowboy boots. He was handsome in a conventional middle-aged way. He didn’t try to prove his masculinity with his handshake, which I appreciated, and he spoke quietly when he offered me a chair. “Care for a drink?”

“No thanks, Mr. Murdoch.”

“‘Ross.’”

“No thanks, Ross.”

“And ‘Sam’s’ okay?”

“Sam’s fine.”

“I’ll be down at the stables, Dad.”

“Thanks, honey.”

“Nice to meet you, Sam,” she said and sounded as if she really meant it. Then she was gone.

I sat in one of the deep leather chairs. He sat, somewhat anxiously, on the edge of his enormous desk. He raised himself up on one side and dug something out of his front pocket. He flipped it in the air toward me. I caught it. A silver dollar.

“That’s when money was money,” he said.

“My early birthday present?”